(in psychosis, spring 2024)

this is what you wanted. well, isn’t it? the conscience, cicatrized care. their sensitive dreck. feelings will be scarce, recycled. face like a freak accident. little embassies of dread. little dread-ambassadors, tritely spouting. they love you. but that’s persuasion’s suck, that’s big-ticket shtick. and their gale-force lack of humility, their crummy stanzas of dispatch. this is what you wanted: some big mr shit-the-sheets shining his pate in your lap. ashen windbags, schmoozed beyond migraine.

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you eunuchs of utopia, sing it with me! the body’s gilded witchcraft, sing it! to be a hyena you have to decide: are you an object or an attribute of fucking eternity? c’mon, what do you think the soul is? try on that dress, it fits you like a limp handshake. ah babes, you are maximum carnival, that which defies and produces the power. ah kid, an inspiral dérive toward collision. the women are coming, their hot breath condescends. your pulse, a perverse interval wherein the devil – a split in the neck – will sequence your quivering. stand by to await upload. stand by to await – so much laboured torrenting. isn’t this what you wanted? person on the internet, launched into light, a known unknown. morning is an insult of sparrows. will tread this minus tide. is idiopathic mumbling, the monkey’s paw, withdrawing round its one remaining wish.

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this is what you wanted. well, isn’t it? and there’s france, sagging in our sight-lines. picture a girl, homely and vicious, pretty as a pound-cake. that’s you, that is. your brother is writing the biography of a vile star that eats and unravels all things. black hole with added elbow grease. joyous day! that’s you, that is. all oral and no tradition. and hey, there’s no cash in the attic, because there isn’t an attic. madwoman in the loft, pinioned between carpet offcuts, polyvinyl christmas trees.

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so what, you’re working class? fuck ’em in their price-per-barrel, fuck ’em in their renege and there gyp. to be torn down, levelled flat, turfed over, used for language. to convert sorrow, through ideation’s phases, into cold ambition. caught between the trespass and the tryst: ectopic. that is, out of place. so what? to strut when you ought to scoot, dragging yourself like a sombre dog. what you fail to appreciate, how you fail to thrive. babes, you are failure inflamed. sorry, failure in flames.

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no, not like fake-it-til’-you-make-it. more like flaxen with felony and stare them down, all those lustrous saxons, making their anglophile whoopie. more like the hiccup in our hormone. more like our strung haunt. nature, amplified, deranged. oh, how they percolate occasion, these pundits of profile, randos of a new low. hey, you enchanted neuters, sing it with me! rub silicone into these marbled gullies. an old scar bristles with wiry hair.

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here is a secret: a poet is an animal, flown at half-mast. dosser’s moon tonight, moon in its overstayed welcome: confessor’s blue, museum blue. poets write about the moon, don’t they? just gathering dust like some vandalised heirloom. silly bitches with clip-art eyes on twitter, prospering unselfconsciously. we know better, the moon is a loafing butch. she’s menopausal. carries the gene for secrecy but not for sleep. she’s not on the side of those deadbeat aggressors. she hates them dead, she’s one of us.

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blah-blah-blah, we don’t care what you think. you bankrupt apologists, you dweebs of love-you-when-you’re-dead. we didn’t fail, we didn’t succeed, we just endured. we are not going to eat more protein, nor dress for the job we wish we had – like a reverse mermaid, in a one-size-fits-all shroud.

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somewhere between the steeped fig and the stewed prune, he advances on you with a lordly tolerance. who are these parasites? a fiction of sisters, a hand to hold through all these happened ages. a hand to hold you under. a hand to hold you down. isn’t this what you wanted? not quite a forgery, not quite a copy. irrecoverable knock-off, the hooky looks on you. and here they come, dewy with status, striding across this limbo of lawns like they own the fucking place. can i click unsubscribe on my life, please? can i hurl these mouth-breathing basics out an airlock? as it is, you accidentally reply-all with the following statement: thanks and everything, but at this stage of my career, i need a gold star for trying about as much as i need a chocolate tampon, so how about no? hotlips, i love you for that.

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woman is a nightmare, though, is a slick mother slashed. blood root, blood wort, a trench cut in never, a pink-washed decree to stick in the craw. you should understand, when they talk about types, they also mean you. and the pale rocking-plate of your belly. and the bald dredging pan of your womb. yes you, don’t believe the open-mouthed immaculate of them. you, the fatigued mistake that no one will suffer to stand, a gamy syllable spawned in meat, a dangling treatise of bones. for the last and final time: this is what you wanted. well, isn’t it? bright world of swelling precedent, spontaneous yet hollow. flowers, the ancestral expedient: and you contain such purges. the whole deal, witlessly multiplying. it’s gonna get worse before it gets better, sing it with me! don’t cry. or do. see if i care.